130 however tactfully handled, this was pub- lic-domain stuff The death had kind of put her into public domain, do you see what I mean?" ALVAREZ had suggested that I go speak ^ to Elizabeth Sigmund, and a few days later I was on a train to Cornwall, where she lives, with her third husband, William. The journey was arduous. The snowstorm was over, but its effects were still being felt by the delicate British rail- way system, and I arrived three hours late. William Sigmund was waiting for me at the station and seemed unexcited by the delay. He is a placid, bearded man in his forties, and, driving to his house, he talked about the work against chemical and biological warfare that he and Eliza- beth have been engaged in for the last twenty years; a foundation funds it. Elizabeth Compton (as she was then) was Plath's great friend in Devon. She knew Plath for only a year, but because it was the last year of Plath's life-the pe- riod of the breakup of the marriage and the writing of the "Ariel" poems-her testimony has assumed enormous weight and significance in the Plath legend. She is the kind of witness the dead crave, the person who speaks only well of them. In the memoir of Plath that she published in 1976 she renders her friend as an entirely remarkable, lovable, deliciously interest- ing, and infinitely touching person. At the end of the famous set piece ("My milk has dried up. . . . Ted. . . has be- come a little man"), she writes that Plath spent the night on the sofa in her living room, and when she came down the next morning she found Plath "bending over a box containing a cat and her new kittens." She adds, "I can see her now, wearing a pink, woolly dressing gown with a long, brown plait of hair fall- ing into the box, turning her head and saying, 'I never saw anything so small and new and vulnerable. They are blind.' What could I do to protect and help this amazing person?" If Elizabeth personified the entirely loving and uncritical friend, she also ful- filled the unreasonable demand we make on confidants during times of domestic discord: that they take our side com- pletely, share our bruised feelings, and adopt our anger toward the person who has injured us as if they had been injured themselves. Elizabeth evidently never stopped blaming Hughes as she loyally blamed him in the summer of 1962 As for Olwyn, Elizabeth writes in her memoir: The most difficult person in Ted's family was his sister Olwyn, who feared and re- sented Sylvia's talent and beauty, as well as her relationship with Ted. Sylvia felt this terrible jealousy deeply, and recognized an insurmountable anger. She often told me that Olwyn hated her, resented her position as another daughter in the family. When I met Olwyn after Sylvia's death, I felt that she had understated Olwyn's attitude; it was one which I found hard to tolerate even at second hand. "I tried to explain to Sylvia the terrible, crushing class system in this country," she continues, "and how people like the Hugheses suffered from it in ways which would be hard for an American college girl to understand. I asked her if she didn't think that, somewhere, Ted had a feeling of inferiority. Her answer was a bitterly scornful laugh. 'Ted has lunched with the Duke of Edinburgh,' she said, which of course was no answer at all.') We arrived at the house, a small cot- tage deep in the country. I found Eliza- beth, a portly woman in a black dress, with a flowered shawl over her shoulders, lying on a sofa in the middle of a small, low-ceilinged room with a large stone fireplace. She was, like Alvarez, older than I had expected, but what gave me a chill was the sight of her swollen feet stretched out on the sofa. On the tele- phone, eXplaining why she could not offer me lunch, she had told me she was suffering from a bad bout of arthritis and could not get around, but only now did I grasp how incapacitated she was. Still, she greeted me with a laughing reference to her- self as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and began to chatter in a way calculated to charm and amuse rather than to invite pity. I could see why Plath would have been attracted to this vivacious woman. William brought a pot of tea and a plate of cookies made from blameless natural ingredients. He then retired to hIs office, a room filled with computer equipment and a photo- copier. Elizabeth settled the shawl around her shoulders and told me stories about Plath and Hughes and Olwyn that I had already read in her memoir and in Butscher's biography, along with stories that were new to me but had taken on the THE NEW YOR.KER., AUGUST 23 & 30, 1993 subtly tainted character of stones told too many times. One of these was an account of a visit Elizabeth had paid to the flat on Fitzroy Road shortly after Plath's death: "Ted was out, and there was a little nanny there looking after the children, and she told me that Nick wouldn't eat anymore. He had been very greedy-like Sylvia, he loved food-but now he wouldn't eat, and he was absolutely silent. We talked for a while and then I asked 'Is Ted com- ing back?' and she said in an embarrassed way, 'Yes, but she's here, you know.' And I said 'Who's "she"?' and the girl said, 'Mrs. Wevill,' and I said 'Living here?' and she said, 'Oh, yes.' Then Ted came back-I heard Assia go up the stairs to the bedroom-and he looked absolutely shattered. He looked at me and just said my name, and then he went into the other room and fetched a copy of 'The Bell Jar.' He was almost in tears. He said, 'This is for you-you haven't seen it,' and I said, 'Yes, thank you.' It was awful. The emotions were so powerful and so awful. And then he said-I know he didn't mean it-'It doesn't fall to many men to murder a genius.' And I thought, Poor man! How is he going to survive? We were standing in the kitchen, and he was boiling a kettle on the cooker-the one where she had gassed hersel[" Stories like this regularly fill biogra- phies and are taken to be true, because they cannot be disproved. In all the biog- raphies of Plath-even in the carefully vetted "Bitter Fame"-impressions and recollections of Hughes by contemporary Witnesses are accorded the status of his- torical fact. One can imagine how Hughes must feel when he picks up one of these books and reads what someone noticed about him, or thought about him, or thought he heard him say, thirty years ago. Memory is notoriously unreli- able; when it is intertwined with ill will, it may become monstrously unreliable. Elizabeth turned from Ted to Olwyn. "I didn't meet her until Sylvia was dead, when she came to Court Green to live With Ted and the children," she said. "I got to know her very well. We played poker together. It was very alarming when you realized you had won, because you felt Olwyn might lean across the table and smack you, though she never did She was a bit wild in her playing. She'd risk a lot. She scared me to death when she was raging-she had a terrible temper and was incredibly sarcastic-but